


statement update.

by hyzkoa



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Help, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:01:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22168300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyzkoa/pseuds/hyzkoa
Summary: The tape starts, playing that practiced uninterested, professional tone, "I sent Martin to look into this Angela character, not that I wanted him to get chopped up of course, but someone had to.” Despite everything, he feels the knives in his heart, the sting each word brings, the poison his own voice drips, and the same pain that brings him down feeds it, feeds him. He wants more. “Apparently, he spent three days looking into any woman named Angela in Bexley over the age of 50… He could not find anyone that matches the admittedly vague description given here, though he informs me he had some very pleasant chats about jigsaws. Useless ass."AKA S4 Jon feels the consequences of S1 Jon
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 3
Kudos: 79





	statement update.

**Author's Note:**

> will this be chaptered or not. no one knows  
> hope u guys enjoy it tho! i love tma

His face lacked emotion, his words  **were** devoid of empathy, almost feigning boredom at the task at hand, as he speaks in an impersonal tone, detaching himself from his job as much as possible. The hairs  **on** the back of his neck stand on their ends, but he maintains his composure and analyzes the statement from a logical point of view. He focuses on facts, follow ups, police records that can confirm what the…  _ victim _ , he thinks reluctantly, wrote for the Institute. 

He does his job.

But _he_ _sees_ he is afraid of the truth, the knowledge. Afraid of giving into… something, _someone_ , whoever, by admitting it; by saying what _it_ wants to hear. ‘It is real.’ _He sees_ how he feels the pressure, the weight of an observer, the unblinking gaze of an eager, _hungry_ spectator. _He sees_ how he avoids looking over his shoulder, how he lies to himself that it’s just his imagination. _He sees_ how he thinks to himself that no one is watching, to not be ridiculous, to focus.

But someone is watching. 

**_He_** is.

And he is not even surprised when he knows he doesn't want to stop watching, he knows he wants to drink it all in, all the hurt.

His  _ own  _ hurt.

So he watches and watches and watches and tears stream down his cheeks at the knowledge that he can't reject, at a truth that he can't ignore. He can’t forget. 

"--!!" Jon wakes up with a gasp, clutching the blankets. He doesn't have time to even form a single thought, to return to reality, to ground himself back in the present through his anchor before he hears the familiar click and whirring.

It's fast forwarding.

And it owns all of his attention.

Jon looks to his night table, and finds the tape recorder sitting next to a pencil holder Martin had bought for him. His pens sat comfortably in it. He wants to touch the holder, he wants to turn around and  _ see  _ his anchor.

He wants to, he knows he does, he is as sure as he could be that he does, but he is not in control of himself, and his eyes are hungry for something else. He is glad for a second he doesn’t turn around, afraid of how he, in this state, could look past Martin and burrow himself in knowledge he had to try and respect. There is nothing that matters to them behind him, the feast  **is** already laid before him, and  _ it  _ doesn’t let him blur the sight with the threat of tears, his eyes instead stuck in a state of burning, of ache. 

It clicks again, and even before it begins, he  **knows** . 

And  _ it _ lets him know that his fears go beyond being trapped in his nightmares, that he is the monster that haunts his dreams. He wants to hear it, he wants to remember, he wants to know and that scares him so very much. 

But he doesn’t sweat. He doesn’t tremble. He doesn’t close his eyes.

He listens and  **_watches_ ** .

"According to the arrest records Sasha uncovered," the tape starts, playing that practiced uninterested,  _ professional  _ tone, "Mr. Rental was telling the truth about the somewhat… checkered past of himself and his associate, Paul Noriega, and the extensive files on both of them. The last listed interaction between the police and Mr. Noriega is two months before Mr. Rental's statement and since then no sign can be found of him in police records, or indeed anywhere else." He sits up now, every fiber of him focused on every syllable uttered, every sentence formed, re-recording his own history for the sake of new context. A quick, breathy laugh escapes him and he hates it; he was  _ updating _ . "I sent Martin to look into this Angela character, not that I wanted him to get chopped up of course,  _ but someone had to _ .” Despite everything, he feels the knives in his heart, the sting each word brings, the poison his own voice drips, and the same pain that brings him down feeds it, feeds  _ him _ . He wants more. “Apparently, he spent three days looking into any woman named Angela in Bexley over the age of 50… He could not find anyone that matches the admittedly vague description given here, though he informs me he had some very pleasant chats about jigsaws.  **Useless ass** ."

The tape recorder clicks again.

He collapses, as if the strings wrapped tightly around his muscles and controlling their movements vanished. So he falls forward like a puppet during the intermission, gasping for the air his lungs refused to keep. Everything that Martin did for him and yet he had dismissed all of that, turning Martin away, closing off every single time Martin tried to get close and not even that. He had made Martin feel like his contributions didn’t matter, like _he_ didn’t matter. With this kind of behaviour he basically put a target on Martin’s back for the Lonely.

Jon is startled by the hand on his back, reaching up to his shoulder, as Martin crawls across the bed towards him. He hears his name repeated over and over, the urgency in the tone rising with each time, and he knows Martin has been calling him for a while now.

"Jon!"

"Martin…" He replies weakly, slowly sitting back up with the help of Martin's gentle grasp. It hurts. "Martin, I…"

"What's wrong?"

"There's...The--my patron, it wanted… an statement... No--a, a follow up, I think?"

“What? At this hour?” And though Martin asked seriously, something about that made Jon chuckle slightly, as if The Eye worked on a schedule. “What?”

“No, nothing… It’s just--they don’t really care about the hour. If anything I think most of the events it feeds on happen at night.”

“I guess. Still, I mean, I thought recording statements gave you energy or something, not sucked it out of you.”

“I--... this was... different,” Jon sighs, “you--you didn’t hear any of it?”

“Not really, I sort of woke up when, uh…" Martin's cheeks reddened, though before he continued the sentence he noticed Jon was blushing furiously. That made it easier. "You're giving me an easy way out, not letting me say these things."

"...I'm not stopping you."

Martin smiled. "I woke up when I was feeling around the bed looking for you. Guess I really wanted to cuddle."

It hurts.

“I…” Jon was speechless. "I'm sorry. Martin, I am so sorry." 

"Jon, tell me what's wrong?"

The words hang on his lips and they hurt, their weigh too real, but the silence doesn't stretch out for long. He decides to let himself speak, clicking play on the tape recorder. A different tape plays, from his first day as head archivist. He belittles Martin right off the bat, the audio cutting off right when he's done talking about him to be followed up by another, where he admits how much of a relief it is to have Martin out of the institute. It continues like that, one after another, the one he heard playing eventually as well and he can't bear the ache inside him, dread filling him up for what was to come out of this. What  _ should  _ come out of this.

He doesn't want to look at Martin but he does. He looks up and takes in his reaction to the tapes, not tearing his sight away for even a second. Martin looks surprisingly calm, though there are a few instances in which that threatens to break, but with a deep inhale he's back to calmly listening, almost as if he was the avatar of The Eye himself.

The tape recorder clicks, and Jon is the first to speak.

"Martin, I…"

"You're sorry, I know."

And Jon had no other option but to stay quiet, as that was all he had in mind to say. 

"You know, I wish I was surprised. I guess some…  _ things _ did catch me off guard, but it's not like you would even look at me in the eyes while dismissing me back then. There were days I didn't care and even made fun of you.." He pauses for a moment, "with Tim, but I honestly even tried to work like Sasha did just to at least feel like you saw me as an equal." Martin laughs, a short, dry laugh. "I underestimated how much of an ass you were back then, painting you as my perfect crush with the perfect hair and all that. I even defended your accent when Tim said you were exaggerating it because I was kind of into it."

Jon knows he looks miserable now, Martin continues.

"I wonder if this was what Elias planned to show me when I was covering you." Jon notices the slight hint of bitterness in that last syllable, and the needles that pricked his heart with every word Martin said now plunge themselves deep into the organ. "Or something worse. Back then these things wouldn't just turn themselves on-- or just appear whenever they wanted, so I must be missing out what could be hours of tape from when we were in the research department."

Jon gets to close his eyes now, but his attention doesn't stray from Martin.

"You know, actually," he does sound mad now, his pitch going up slightly in that way it does when he's had it; when he's tired of being stepped on, "what happened? How did you go from  _ that _ to…" he hesitates, and the needles suffocate his heart further, "to this? How do you go from hating me to this?"

It hurts, how hate comes so easy to his lips but the opposite doesn't. He's hesitant, doubting all of it. He's scared, and so is Jon.

"Martin, I--I didn't hate you, I would never--"

" _ Don't _ . I know what I heard, you know what you heard-- you know what  _ you _ said.  **_It_ ** wanted us to hear it for a reason and I'm guessing it's… what we're  _ both _ feeling right now, so stop dragging it out.” He pauses, and looks away, moving away from Jon, towards the opposite edge of the bed. "And, yeah, I mean, I knew you were a jerk sometimes but  _ this _ \--” he sighs, “this is just... Tell me, Jon, how do you go from saying that to… to telling me--I just, what did I do to you?"   


Jon’s hands ball into fists, clutching at the blankets beneath him. He looks at Martin over his shoulder, though there is not much to see aside how Martin turns his back to him. Jon looks down, eyes piercing holes in his knees. He feels like a statement subject, though Martin can’t pull the words out of him exactly, so he struggles to find--to create the right answer. He wants to lie, to twist and change his past reality to save Martin any more hurt -- but he can’t, he feels like he got to this point by lying by omission as well, and he’s already hurt Martin  _ so  _ much.

"When I woke up… I was different, I didn't notice at first but something did change. The knowledge wasn't just from others… it included me, very much like it's watching this now." And Jon's hand shakes, a strange tickling sensation creeping up burnt skin that should be nothing but numb. He fears it watches because this will push Martin back into The Lonely, he fears that once again he will be the one to offer Martin to an entity in a silver plate, and lastly he fears that from the beginning his perception of Martin was being manipulated when the truth was the complete opposite of the poison in his words when he'd pronounce his name.

"And I take it that knowledge was that you didn't hate my guts?"

"I… was never good with people. And you trying to get so close to me, I… I didn't react well. I think--I think it was that."

Martin sighs. "You didn't react well."

"I've always driven people away." Jon adds.

Martin doesn't reply, and instead looks away. The silence weighs heavy between them. And then there’s movement; Martin gets up from the bed--their bed--and exits the room, leaving Jon alone.

Jon is left alone in the room, and he notices the tape recorder’s soft whirring. He turns it off.


End file.
